Microsoft Ups Online War, Says Google's 'Failing'

CWmike writes "Raising the stakes in its war of words, Microsoft said on Tuesday that Google simply doesn't understand what businesses need, and is failing at pushing its way into the enterprise. In this edited version of his interview with Computerworld, Microsoft's senior director of Online Services, Tom Rizzo, talks about Google's privacy issues, scanning user data, the difference between consumer and corporate needs, and his doubts about Google surviving in the enterprise space. He also said he thinks Google will be shocked to see Microsoft's momentum into the enterprise cloud sector."

Comments

has any fortune 500 company gone Google Apps?

[alen]

i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees

Re:has any fortune 500 company gone Google Apps?

[TheEyes]

i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees

By "it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees" you really mean "because bribing a government employee is harder than a corporate CIO," right?

Government agencies are looking to cut costs right now, given that their budgets are likely to be slashed in the coming years, and Google services are cheaper than rolling your own. Government IT workers are digging in their heels, both to preserve their jobs and to avoid having to be retrained, but the momentum these days in the public sector is going cheap, and that means Google.

For all the ranting about special interests and lobbying in the public sector, private companies have even less accountability. There is nothing preventing the MS sales rep from taking the company CIO on a complimentary golf game and getting an exclusive contract, even if Google or someone else could save the company millions.

Re:Succesful troll is failing

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, Google isn't failing in advertising, but that's a different business unit. That's unrelated to the sector the Microsoft rep was talking about. I'm inclined to agree with the MS assertion that Google's enterprise services aren't taking hold in the market. In a general sense, Google is doing pretty well. Usually MS reps are just talking BS whenever they talk about a competitor this time their BS might actually line up with the truth for once.

Re:Huh?

[Tharsman]

What enterprise momentum in the cloud sector? What CIO is seriously going to shunt critical infrastructure into some cloud environment? Seriously? Who? Backups...maybe? Personal photos and email? Of course. But, trade secrets? Human Resources info? Salaries and performance evaluations? To the cloud? Really?

Depends how you define cloud. I love virtualization, and my company (not small at all) does too. It's not about email or online office though, it's about a full blown desktop and storage that you log in as if you were connecting to a Remote Desktop Connection. Your travel laptop with all your files fails? Good thing all those files are actually in the "business cloud", along with all your programs and settings. Just get a new laptop fed-ex'ed or temporarily log in with another machine to the VPN and keep on running.

Since I'm here, I also got to say I do, sort of, agree with Microsoft in this one. I would rather trust my entire world to Microsoft (And I hate them) before I entrust confidential information to Google's snooping services.

Did you PAY for support?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want support beyond the forums you're supposed to sign up for a paid account. Did you?

Re:What passes for dreams at Microsoft:

[hairyfeet]

Really, why is that? Most SMBs I know are running Windows desktop and AD and Exchange servers along with MS Office, so if they can tie into that seamlessly there really isn't a reason why they can't grab serious share.

Look, you can hate MSFT on ideology, on past business dealings, whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that there is a reason why MSFT rules the corporate roost. It is because they make it butt simple and seamless when it comes to integrating their corporate products. There simply isn't anything in the Linux or OSX line up that compares to ADS+Exchange+Sharepoint+Visual Studio, there really isn't. Sure you can get "kinda sorta, but not really" by having a half a dozen different things written by different groups bolted together, but even then it just doesn't compare.

So to me the bigger question is this: Will MSFT actually allow their cloud teams to act like corporate software developers, or will Ballmer try to push it into the consumer space trying to be Steve Jobs? Because so far their corporate offerings have been pretty damned good, but lately Ballmer has seemed obsessed with consumer markets and trying to fit everyone into the same box. If they leave the cloud group alone, or have separate consumer and business lines, then I can see them gaining serious share. Corporations love only having one vendor to bitch at, and having WinPhone tied to the corporate Intranet and everything backed up and accessible through the cloud sounds like a tempting proposition, but if Ballmer insists on adding a bunch of consumer junk the corps don't need it will be a big can o' fail.

Re:Translation

[PCM2]

Has anyone tried Office 365? Is it any good?

I've played around with it, and my impression is that it is indeed "pretty good," but not necessarily any better than Google Docs or an adequate replacement for the way people do things now.

One thing that bothered me that I don't think I was adequately able to articulate in the article is that it just doesn't feel as good to be doing all my work "in the cloud," i.e. over an Internet connection, as doing it the old-fashioned way. Sure, you can save a document directly to your SharePoint site from within Microsoft Word. But there's no kind of feedback that acknowledges "hey, I'm attempting to save this over the Internet, and anything could happen between here and the server, so sit tight and we'll try to make this work." Instead it just acts like it's the same thing as saving to your local drive, or even to a local server, which it's not. So every now and then I'd experience some unexplained delay and I'd find myself going to the SharePoint site and refreshing things in my browser to make sure everything worked right. And because I was using the same software I'd use to do things "the old-fashioned way," I kept asking myself, "Why do I have to do this on the stupid 'cloud'? Why can't I just save this to my drive and then copy my final draft to the server?" (Of course you can, but then using a "cloud solution" starts to have diminishing returns.)

I think the biggest advantage of Office 365, like BPOS before it, is not having to maintain your own Exchange server. SharePoint can be pretty useful too, but it seems to me that the learning curve required to get it into a form that your company can actually use productively is pretty high. And as far as using the Web-based versions of the Office apps, I I don't rate them very highly at all; they certainly aren't much better than Google Docs, unless you really, really need a way to view complex Office documents on the Web (as opposed to using Office).

Those who can, do...

[Rexdude]

..the rest just act bombastic and make controversial statements. Cloud computing has been talked about for a few years, and most companies have their plans related to it in place. I work for IBM, and cloud computing is taken quite seriously here. There's a push for virtualization of services and hardware, and there are internal presentations and talks by experts in the field. For the outside world, IBM quietly continues to make its offerings available without too much fanfare.

I'm going off topic here, but I think it has to do with corporate culture. IBM is perhaps the founder of what we call 'Information Technology' and was already more than 50 years old when the present day Silicon Valley companies started up in the 70s. All the Silicon Valley companies have a strong cult of personality attached to their founder-CEOs (and even later ones). You cannot think of Microsoft without associating with Bill Gates, or Oracle -Larry Ellison, Sun - Scott Nealy, Apple - Steve Jobs, or until recently, HP - Carly Fiorina. In IBM's case, the brand is bigger than any individual CEO, in fact one doesn't immediately think of Thomas Watson Sr. either when talking of IBM. Can anyone quickly recall who headed the company when it made the mistake of letting Microsoft have the license to DOS instead of buying it out? (without looking up Wiki).

It is very rare for an IBM executive to make controversial statements in the tech media about other companies- unlike the people mentioned above, who have all been sources of great quotes at various times. Google is similar, in that it largely doesn't crow about its success (though CEO Eric Schmidt will forever be quoted for his views on online privacy).

Re:Used to be a Google Fanboy

[noidentity]

We use Google Docs for all documents. Recently, after an employee left the company we deleted his account. Every document that he shared with the company is still visible in the Docs list, but there is no way to open them. It returns an error. Posts on Google Docs help site have gotten 0 useful responses other than "documents shared with others should still be accessible". They are not. There is no tech support.

Damn that sucks, but why would you EVER trust a third-party with the only copy of your data? Use the cloud for services, not critical data storage. If they don't make it easy to keep a local mirror, you need to find another solution. Hell, I keep copies of most everything I download, because I never know when the provider will go and remove it from their site.